Southern Literary Fiction

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naïve 19-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town and a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas fathers a dynasty that will last more than 200 years. His descendants play their part in the forging of a nation, but greed and prejudice see an irreparable rift in the family which will echo through the generations. It is only at the dawn of the new millennium - as an old journal lays bare a terrible secret - that the family can finally reclaim its honour....

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilisation. This is the twelfth expedition. Their group is made up of four women: An anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naive nineteen-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town in the penal colony of New South Wales. Discarding allegiance to the country that has disowned him, Thomas, an honest man at heart, seizes a second chance and begins a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas Kendall fathers a dynasty that will last beyond 200 years.

Jimmy is a kid growing up fast on the poorest street in town. He tries to do everything right and look out for his mum and his younger brother. His older brother is in jail, so it's up to Jimmy to hold things together. But small-town life is unforgiving if you're from the other side of the tracks.

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.

As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought.

Jo and Bethie Kaufman were born into a world full of promise. Growing up in 1950s Detroit, they live in a perfect 'Dick and Jane' house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life.

Joan was only a child the last time she visited Memphis. She doesn't remember the bustle of Beale Street on a summer's night. She doesn't know she's as likely to hear a gunshot ring out as the sound of children playing. How the smell of honeysuckle is almost overwhelming as she climbs the porch steps to the house where her mother grew up. But when the front door opens, she does remember Derek. This house full of history is home to the women of the North family.

Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.

Alexandra Haywood and her sister Neely have always loved Whistledown, the family's Shelby County horse farm. After their billionaire father's sudden and tragic death, Alex returns to find the family fortune in shambles, and Whistledown has to go. But Joe Welch, the sexy farm manager, refuses to cooperate. Sparks of rage give way to a fiery attraction when Joe and Alex meet head-on. But just as a volatile passion flares between them, the discovery of a shocking murder with ties to the past rocks the county.

A favorite of longtime Harry Crews fans, The Knockout Artist (1988) portrays Eugene Talmadge Biggs, a young boxer from rural Georgia whose champion rise is diverted by a vulnerability, or gift, for knocking himself unconscious. As he begins to exploit his talents, the notorious Knockout Artist journeys a hero’s descent into the New Orleans underworld and meets characters who have long since checked their morals at the door. The unforgettable climax shows Crews at his virtuoso best, when Eugene confronts his truth, and sets out to claim his freedom and win his own self-respect.

Four years ago, the Eternal Slumber Funeral Home put Chicken Teater in the ground. Now undertaker Emma Lee Raines is digging him back up. The whole scene is bad for business, especially with her granny running for mayor and a big festival setting up in town. But ever since Emma Lee started seeing ghosts, Chicken's been pestering her to figure out who killed him.

On the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue, an island consumed by the flames of revolution, a senseless attack leaves only one survivor - an infant girl. She falls into the hands of two French émigrés, Henri and Solange Fournier, who take the beautiful child they call Ruth to the bustling American city of Savannah. What follows is the sweeping tale of Ruth's life as shaped by her strong-willed mistress and other larger-than-life personalities she encounters in the South.

Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.

This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that—with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers—here approaches the Shakespearean.

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.

The gravy train hasn’t stopped in the hollers of western Virginia for more than 30 years when Stony Shelor starts his junior year at Jubal Early High. Class divides and racism are still the hardened norms as the Eisenhower years draw to a close. Violence lies coiled under the calm surface, ready to strike at any time.

Harper Lee beschwört den Zauber und die Poesie einer Kindheit im tiefen Süden der Vereinigten Staaten: Die Geschwister Scout und Jem wachsen im Alabama der 1930er Jahre auf. Jäh bricht die Wirklichkeit in ihre behütete Welt ein, als ihr Vater, der Anwalt Atticus Finch, einen wegen Vergewaltigung angeklagten Schwarzen verteidigt. Finch lehrt seine Kinder Verständnis und Toleranz, allen Anfeindungen und Angriffen ihrer "ehrbaren" Mitbürger zum Trotz.

A northern white couple has relocated to the South to operate a vineyard on a North Carolina plantation. There, they pass their idle hours listening to the stories of one Uncle Julius, who has a deep knowledge of the land. These stories, however, are more than mere entertainments. They all have their time and place, and they offer not only a quiet commentary on the events of the day but also a deeper reckoning with the plantation’s disturbing past.